The Mass in Transition

In the first quarter of the twenty-first century, numerous Catholics, having rediscovered the treasures of tradition that pioneers of the Liturgical Movement such as Dom Prosper Guéranger savored and sought to disseminate, are now casting about for explanations of what exactly happened in the upheavals of the 1960s—why so many things were changed so drastically, and who was responsible for it. Naturally, the sources for such research are abundant, but many are poorly known or hard to come by.A case in point is the present work, The Mass in Transition. Jesuit Father Gerald Ellard was a famous popularizer of the “best ideas” of the Liturgical Movement—whether in fact they turned out to be for the best or otherwise. His work is largely forgotten today because of the tsunami of change that overtook not only the unsuspecting laity but also many lower-level liturgists, who, if they were not part of the innermost circles, could hardly have dared to believe the magnitude of the revolution in C